Blast from the Past Time

So here's a fun little blast from the past. I was googling around looking for something and digging through the wayback machine and I came across one of my old websites. It used to contain links to stream all my videos at the time. Looking through, only 3 or 4 are still linked correctly (I have the originals somewhere...who knows where) so I was happy to find it! One of the videos is actually the first actual short film I ever did that contained a plot and editing conventions and all that stuff.

Do you want to see it? Ok...be warned. The quality is TERRIBLE. It's a wmv I snatched from the website where it lies peacefully. The movie is 4 minutes long, but the file is about 1.2 mb. The bitrate is 2100 BITS per second. Not kb..bits. Yikes.



By the way, I was thinking about what I used to have to go through in order to get my videos online compared to now. I had to find server space (for free since I was without a job at the time) and build a functioning website, and effectively stream media without spending all my bandwidth. THEN find a way to get it noticed by people. To get that video on youtube today, I grabbed it and tossed it in an upload and changed some info, and suddenly it's available on my channel for the world to see. When it popped up on youtube I pondered this for a long time.

Some background on the video itself...I made it in 2002. It was right after we all went to a football game actually, making it early fall and therefore I was BARELY 15 years old. CRAZY. I thought I had edited this on an old dumb editing program called MGI Videowave, but thankfully I felt the need to list the NLE in the credits - Premiere 6.0 (YEEESH). I don't really remember exactly how the idea for this video came about. We just kind of improvised it. I find it to be brilliant for a 15 year old, if I do say so myself. For a first short film, it's got some pretty decent camera angles. It has matching action, rule of thirds, nice framing, movement in the shots...really not bad at all. The pacing is a bit slow, but I like to think I was going for a slow build up of tension. This was shot on a Sony Handycam on Hi8. Ingesting analog to digital was such a blast, especially with Premiere. It definitely taught me patience and troubleshooting when it comes to digitizing. And to realize that sometimes you do everything right and the computer just doesn't feel like working for you.

I really like the last bit of action with the matching action on the soup can being raised to bludgeon the victim. The framing is awesome. I'm glad I thought of that shot. I remember trying to get it framed right....it was difficult.

So there you go, my roots are in improvised horror flicks.